The way to death in Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" and Anton Chekhov's "The Man in a Case"

Kate Chopin’s (1850-1904) short stories have become the cornerstones in the field of short fiction writing. Mainly influencing the feminist writing of her epoch, Chopin’s short stories like “The Story of an Hour”, “Désirée’s Baby”, “The Storm” and many others have established her as one of the most prominent short story writers. Another distinguished short story writer of the same period was Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), a famous Russian author, whose short stories make the readers smile and, at the same time, question themselves. His most popular short stories – “The Man in a Case”, “Gooseberries”, “A Woman’s Kingdom” and many others – depict a simple life but present the author’s richness of articulation and narration. This study will analyse Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” (1894) and Anton Chekhov’s “The Man in a Case” (1898) in terms of the processes that lead the protagonists to their deaths. The comparative study of these two short stories will show that the protagonists in both works go through three main temporal-psychological dimensions: suppression, freedom (change of state), and death. Mrs. Mallard and Belikov, suppress their true selves until a particular point in their lives. After they eventually experience a sense of vague and short freedom and a radical change of state, they suddenly die. This study will analyse the tools of suppression, the ways to freedom and transformation, and the processes that lead the main characters to death. The study will conclude that the close temporal paradigm of the authors paved the way for Chopin’s and Chekhov’s similar understanding of the concept of freedom.